Marketing Channel Strategy
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| Physical possession
refers to channel activities pertaining to the storage of goods, including transportation between channel members. The costs of running warehouses and transporting products from one location to another are physical possession costs. In the case of commercial personal computer (PC) purchases, CDW’s intermediary role creates significant physical possession costs and required investments, including those to maintain its 400,000-square-foot warehouse, where it houses the massive volumes of products it buys from manufacturers. For a service, such as online bill payment, physical possession costs seemingly should CHANNEL BASICS 47 be lower, but they still apply to channel members who host the data (i.e., own, operate, and maintain the computer hardware and software systems to provide ready access to financial data in the system). This channel function might seem trivial at first glance, but in services markets, it is both costly and utterly crucial to the channel’s success. The costs of physical possession are distinct from the costs of ownership . When a channel member takes title to goods, it bears the cost of carrying the inventory; its capital is tied up in the product (whose opportunity cost is equal to the next highest value use of that capital). In many distribution systems, such as commercial PC sales, physical possession and ownership move together through the channel, but this pairing is neither necessary nor universal, as three exam- ples show. First, consignment selling means that a retailer physically holds the product (e.g., painting in an art gallery), but the manufacturer (e.g., painter) retains ownership. The manufacturer gives up ownership only by selling it to an end-user. Second, ownership is separate from physical possession when a manufacturer or retailer contracts with a third-party reverse logistics specialist to handle the reverse logistic function but still retains ownership. The logistics specialist simply receives payment, as a fee for service or a percentage split of the ultimate resale revenue earned from returned merchandise. Third, a data hosting company in the online bill payment situation we mentioned previously never actually owns the data it holds. Despite these examples, we acknowledge that physical possession and ownership move together in many channel systems. The term commonly used to designate their combined costs is tải về 5.39 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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